It seems that everyone is talking about the importance of content marketing, how it is different to simple link building and how it is a far more effective SEO strategy in the long term for all businesses and all blog aficionados.

Careful analysis of the pros and cons of content marketing reveal that the present hype is by no means misplaced. Content marketing is certainly a very effective way of improving your site’s quality score, climbing up the rankings on the search results pages and driving traffic to your site on a regular basis.

What do the experts have to say about content marketing?
Over at Point Blank SEO, the general consensus seems to be that the positive effects of content marketing last longer than those which develop as a result of link building. Content marketing is also far less expensive than link building.

It’s also made very clear that content marketing gives more back to your clients or readers and so does wonders for your branding marketing campaigns as much as it does to help increase sales or raise all types of conversions associated with your business and your business’ marketing campaigns.

Daily SEO Tip also concurs that the main reason business owners choose to invest in content marketing is because of the long term marketing success that it affords. The experts at Daily SEO Tip go a little further and offer advice as to the style and focus of top quality posts for content marketing purposes.

It is recommended that the blog or website owner focus specifically on educational content. Writing content simply about what your company does and why it is so fabulous is not the best way of securing a loyal following because there is nothing in your content that your readers can take away with them. Instead of encouraging them to buy through your content, share tips and advice with them from your expert knowledge of the industry in which you work.

It is also really important, Daily SEO Tip, makes it clear that there’s a huge drive on social networking promotions of your content because nobody will read it if they don’t know that it’s there to read. Along the same lines, there’s no shame in reinventing old content by reposting it as one of your best posts ever (if it truly was) or by using a snippet of an old post as the basis of the idea in a new post.

Quick Sprout makes two really important points. The first is that content marketing, unlike link building, is not affected by search engine algorithms… great news!… The second is that headlines form one of the most important elements to consider when working on a content marketing strategy.

The thing to remember is that content marketing is now making it more difficult for dodgy websites to appear with lots of links and do well in terms of search engine ratings, which is just as it should be.

The cons of content marketing are…
If we break things down as simply as possible, the cons of content marketing include the following:

You have to actually care about what you write (not a con for people who are genuinely interested in their busy, industry or content, but it is a con for those people who are looking to climb the search engine listings fast)

You have to be devoted to developing content regularly
Your content must be high quality and must help people in some way
You will need to continue providing fresh content, which means the work will never stop
You might find that there is so much work that you have to invest in a professional content writer or content marketing team in order to produce the amount and quality of the content required

The pros of content marketing make all the difference…
One of the great things about content marketing is that you are able to provide information about the industry and provide interesting content / tips for your readers to benefit from.

If you really love your job or enjoy working in the business industry that you are working in, a content marketing strategy begs you to be creative, to dream up quality headlines, to win Internet users over with your turns of phrase and to provide essential information for someone out there who might just be really grateful for your help.

By investing, and truly investing, in your website / blog / business, you will gradually develop followers for life and perhaps even catch a few customers along the way too. The time, money and creativity that you invest in content marketing will last for years and years. Every day, the return on investment will improve and when you begin to reap the benefits of this marketing approach, you will feel that the effort was completely worthwhile.

Link building is a get rich quick way of going about online marketing and it rarely works (like most get rich quick scams). Content marketing is a respectable marketing strategy, full of integrity and soul. Internet users know the difference and your efforts will be repaid.

How does content marketing complement a pay per click campaign?
As a final thought, it is also worth highlighting the ways in which a content marketing strategy can help to boost the efforts that you might be making via a pay per click advertising campaign too.

If you want to pay less for your pay per click advertising, your website needs to have a high quality score, your landing pages need to be well-designed and your website needs to be full of useful and appropriate content that is updated on a regular basis. Content marketing can naturally guide you towards achieving all of this, which means that your paid search marketing will start to cost you less thanks to a real investment in your target audience and their needs.

Pay per click advertising and content marketing are two very different forms of online marketing and they operate independently of each other, but the positive effects that one has over the other are indisputable. In this sense, investing in content marketing can actually end up saving you advertising money too.

Content marketing is a win win situation for all advertisers looking to take their businesses to the next level. So… get writing!

About Mona Moore

Mona Moore has written 15 posts in this blog.

Mona Moore is the President at SEO Services. Over the past seven years, Mona has owned and operated this successful development firm and worked with a variety of clients to grow their web presence.
Previous to that, Mona worked as an engineer for General Motors North American Operations in Pontiac, MI and Mesa, AZ. She held a variety of positions during the ten-year period she was with GM, beginning as a supplier quality engineer and ending as a finite element analysis engineer.
Mona holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Pittsburgh.